


here comes a storm

by backseats



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roller Derby, F/F, Human Gritty, One Shot, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 16:03:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21358921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backseats/pseuds/backseats
Summary: Trav likes knowing she’s around though, feeling her looming somewhere nearby even when she can’t make out her slender limbs and fuchsia skates across the blur of bodies and long whips of hair.
Relationships: Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 8
Kudos: 60





	here comes a storm

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer that if you are/know anyone in this please click away. this is not in any way representative of the people mentioned and is purely nonsense spin-off fiction.
> 
> (title from 'heaven tonight' by hole. entirely inspired by jolach's fic contact sport, which you can read [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419301?view_adult=true))

There isn’t much in Trav’s life that she has, like, figured out. She can’t really hold down a steady side hustle to make some extra money, she’s never _ once _ been on time with paying rent, her truck’s falling apart, and she dropped out of college after two semesters. But on the _ track, _it’s an entirely different story. She soars out there, keeps her elbows sharp, knows when to pull back and when to surge forward, isn’t afraid to gut-punch someone else to get ahead. Somehow, every night she’s out there, something just clicks. Everything falls into place around her and the roar of the crowd gives way to a high, spangly hum zipping through her ears and she’s just a vessel of muscle, speed and pure, unfiltered grit. She lives for it, that nervous anticipatory feeling unfurling in her gut when she hears the announcer’s voice booming through the stadium, loud enough to rattle through her ribcage. 

“_Give it up! They’re here, and they’re fu-urious tonight! It’s the Filthy! Fuckin’! Flyers!” _

And sure, it’s always followed up by a lame joke mumbled over the intro song about how they’re dead last in the league standings, but it’s not like that really makes it any less of an adrenaline rush. 

This time Jack whines some fresh drivel into the microphone, his voice shrinking back into a bored little hum after the gusto he always brings to their introduction. Trav’s heard that Gritty slips him fives to keep the energy up in the opener. 

_ “Well, I don’t really know _ why _ they call ‘em that, ‘cause they don’t seem to do much flyin’ out there…” _

Trav doesn’t actually know what his name is, and doubts anyone else in the league does either. Apart from Gritty, who likes to take him out drinking in their local dive bar with the broken jukebox—supposedly to talk about derby, but Trav privately thinks he just wants to sit _ way _too close to him on the torn-up vinyl stools. She isn’t sure Gritty has any other friends apart from G. And family absolutely doesn’t count, by her mark. A long time ago everyone had just started calling him that instead of ‘the announcer’.

Jack’s short for Jackass. 

But tonight is pretty bad, even for them. She’s been hip checked _ six _ times, fallen flat on her ass in the middle of the track twice as a result, and almost sprained her ankle trying to pull her legs under her quicker than the skates of an opposing team member could whip past. Patty keeps shooting her concerned looks, and she pointedly ignores all of them. That’s like, not something she can really deal with right now. It’s hard to ignore Patty on the track though, even when she’s sitting on the bench. A couple inches past six foot, she’s always been the tallest in any given match, often towering over the coaches too. Trav likes knowing she’s around though, feeling her looming _ somewhere _ nearby even when she can’t make out her slender limbs and fuchsia skates across the blur of bodies and long whips of hair. 

There’s ten minutes to go, and they’re trailing sixteen points behind the Minnesota Wet’n’Wilds. Trav accepts their loss at the end of the night, but not before she pivots where she’s standing and smashes her fist into the mouth of a blonde girl who’d been really up her ass the whole time. She gets a head-butt and a hot splatter of bloody saliva across her nose in response, but Trav feels justified when the girl spits out a tooth before being hauled back by the ref. Trav smiles wide and impish at the jeering, piss drunk crowd as they’re being forcibly pulled apart, raising her hands up and motioning for more. They spin away from each other in a long, spiralling arc to their respective penalty benches as splashes of beer glisten under the hot stadium lights, jostled elbows and wayward hands reaching out from the shadows. It’s hit that point in the night where the crowd is up and moving, seething and writhing together like a single entity. 

_ “Aa-nd that’s another thirty seconds for Break Neck Konecny! When she’s not breaking necks, she’s clearly going for noses…” _ Jack trails off as Trav viciously flips him the bird and bares her teeth. He rolls his eyes, scratches at his substantial sideburns as he draws the microphone closer and leans towards her. _ “Yeah, well, look where _ that _ attitude just got you, sweetheart.” _

Gritty leaps up from the coach bench to slice his hand across his throat and shout something that looks a little like “_pipe the _ fuck _ down” _at Jack, face all pink and flushed behind the beard and all his freckles. 

As she laughs and pulls off her helmet, her eyes catch Giroux’s from the middle of the track. She’s fixing her with a murderous look, eyes sparking with irritation behind the dark slashes of black across her eyelids. They flare out towards her temples, and she reminds Trav of the little White-Crowned Sparrows she used to see back home when she went out hunting with her dad. G’s makeup is always harsh and striking, a visual _ fuck you _ to whoever might look at her the wrong way. Trav’s smile dims, and she stares resolutely down at the cracked and peeling orange star on the material stretched over her helmet. It looks up at her sadly, lopsided and grubby in her lap. For a second she wonders if she would’ve been able to tie it up in ten minutes, pass the four Wet’n’Wilds blockers six whole times without getting knocked on her ass. The more rational side of her brain (the one that’s fully a Filthy Flyer) tonelessly calls bull_shit _ on that little pipe dream.

The horn finally blares, and tonight marks their third consecutive loss in the past five match-ups. Trav’s used to losing, since it’s all they seem to do, but she _ hates _losing consistently enough to constitute calling it a slump. 

When it’s over, Trav finds Patty sitting on the floor of the handicapped bathroom with the broken lock, her long legs splayed out milky pale and coltish. She always comes here after particularly brutal losses, not up to joking and shooting the shit with the rest of the team in the locker room. Her knee pads lie in a crumpled heap beside her and there’s a shining mauve bruise blooming on her right thigh. She looks up from pulling off her skates and there’s a little notch between her eyebrows when her gaze settles on Trav. Her eyes are big and doe-like, their wan blue near holographic under the buzzing fluorescent bulb of the bathroom. 

Trav collapses across from her, rolling her right foot forward to a stop between Patty’s thighs, an unspoken request. Patty blows out a blustery sigh and starts pulling at Trav’s laces, thin fingers flexing and relaxing across the grubby strings. Trav rolls her head back to knock out the kink in her neck and feels her damp hair stick to the hollow of her equally damp collarbones. The floor is tacky under her hands, and she can feel specks of dirt digging into the soft flesh of her palms. The bathroom smells like their sweat, a little wisp of the metallic scent of blood in the air too. It’s gross, and Trav heaves a huge lungful of it. 

“That’s dis_gus_ting.”

Of _ course _ Patty knows what she’s doing. Trav straightens her head to fix her with a lazy grin.

“Nothin’ like the smell of roller derby,” she says innocuously, fatigue beating her words into soft, slurred things. 

Patty’s mouth skews to the side, and she reaches a hand up to knuckle at her cheek, smudging up the stripes of eyeblack there. There’s a split in her left eyebrow that’s been disinfected and held together with a butterfly stitch. The adhesive tape stands out creamy and white against the deep pink flush of her skin. 

“You’re wa-_ay _ too into this,” she mumbles, but Trav knows there’s no real heat behind it. Patty’s in just as deep as she is. 

Trav turns her head to stare at them in the grubby full length mirror beside the door. Her eyes flick across the bright pink slap of skin in the middle of her forehead from the headbutt, the crusting flakes of blood across her nose and cheeks. She stares at Patty’s bruise, swears it’s doubled in size since she walked in, all burst capillaries and angry, purpling skin. Two figures, one hunched over and the other sprawled out, both clad in eye-wateringly orange tennis skirts and their sweat drenched uniform shirts. Trav had crudely cut the sleeves off hers early in the season, and Patty had ended up hemming them for her after she offhandedly mentioned that all the little threads kept sticking to her armpits. Trav hadn’t even asked. Pats had just done it. 

Trav stares at Patty’s long, elegant foot outstretched beside her in her worn out knee-high socks, their material bobbly and worn. She thinks about reaching out and resting her hand there just below the knee, presses her palm even firmer into the ground to quell the urge.

Patty’s fingers dance across Trav’s ankle, squeeze there for a minute to pull her foot free from the sweaty confines of her skate. 

“Saw you almost break this tonight,” she says, her pale fingers still wrapped loosely around the ankle, stark and glowing white against Trav’s tanned skin. 

Trav lets out a warbly little laugh. “Yeah _right_,” she scoffs. “Worst that would’a been was a sprain, Pats.”

Patty doesn’t look up from where she’s untying Trav’s other skate. “Next time their jammer lays a hit on you, let me elbow her in the throat,” she says, her voice rough and scratchy and monotonous the way it always is. Her eyes dart up and she looks at Trav through her eyelashes, sweat and humidity making her hair fall all around her face in long dark strands instead of its usual soft, knotted curls. “Just gimmie the go-ahead, and I’ll do it.” 

Trav swallows. “Sure,” is all she can manage to say back, faux-confident. She’s still caught up in Patty’s intense stare, eyes darting down her prominent nose, across the rosy blush staining her sharp cheekbones and the swell of her bottom lip.

Patty smiles and it’s a slow-spread, knowing thing. “Good,” she says, the tips of her ears flushing happily from where they’re poking past her hair. 

She brings a thumb up to swipe across the congealed crimson on Trav’s nose, fingertips burning hot where they land on the side of Trav’s cheek. “Who’s blood is this?”

* * *

Trav stumbles into Gritty in the hallway, his big maudlin eyes narrowing as she raises her hands up in a snarky little show of surrender. 

“Y’think you’re cute, sockin’ that jammer in the face tonight?” He says, scrubbing the heel of his palm across his dark beard. When Trav has first found out Giroux and Gritty we’re cousins, she’d ribbed her mercilessly about how much she resembled him, from their straight Roman noses to their electric ginger shocks of hair. She thinks about bringing those taunts back as Gritty frowns his intensely freckled face down at her. 

She shrugs. “C’mon, Grits—” she starts, hiking her duffel bag up higher on one tilted shoulder. 

He steps away from her and tangles his hands up in his hair, the movement making the material of his shirt ripple and dance, skewing up the already lopsided ‘_ COACH’ _blazed across the center. 

“TK,” he says, and it sounds like he’s grinding his molars together as he forces the word out. “You’re a great jammer. You’re—” he pauses to pinch the bridge of his nose, rubs furiously at it like it’s hurting him to praise her. “You’re an annoying little shit, but you’re a _ great _ fuckin’ jammer. So get your _ act _ together, and stop takin’ fuckin’ penalties when you should be takin’ points.” He rushes that last part out, elbows at ninety degrees with his hands on his hips above the goofy cut-off jean shorts he’s always wearing. 

Something inside Trav swells with pride, and she pokes her tongue through her teeth when she smiles up at him. She clucks out a little _ aww,_ catching Vee’s eye over Grits’ shoulder, where she’s saluting her from the end of the hallway. Her big mane of strawberry-blonde hair is backlit by the artificial light and glowing silver as Patty ambles by to muss it up with her free hand, swinging her duffel around in the other.

“I love you _ too_, Gritty,” Trav says, mouth full of sugar and sweetness and absolute bullshit as she shoulders past him and makes a face at Vee. 

“I _ mean _ it, Konecny!” She hears Gritty’s nebbish voice bouncing off the walls behind her as she’s leaving, bounding toward the exit and making obscene gestures at Vee and Patty. They return them with vigour, Vee poking her tongue around in her mouth and waving a loose fist back and forth like a moron; Patty crashing her hands into her hips and rolling her eyes back in her head. Gritty’s voice rings out again.

“Clean your act the _ fuck _up!”

* * *

It’s practice day, and Trav is hungover. Like brutally, head-spinningly hungover. She lies back on the bench in the locker room, lets the hard planks of wood press dents into her shoulder blades. Patty’s hand cups the crown of her head for a moment as she pads past, socked feet slipping across the cheap linoleum floor. Trav rolls her eyes to the side without moving her head to stare at Patty’s pointy knees, creamy skin all pinked and scarred up from when she was a kid, roller skating up and down driveways in Winnipeg.

“Hey TK!” she hears a distinctly French-Canadian voice call from her left, and her gaze snaps back to the buzzing bulbs on the ceiling. “Good jam last night, for the five seconds you were out there.” The way G pronounces ‘out’ is the same as her and Patty, one long stretchy word: _oat. _

She flips out a hand palm-up, and Giroux slaps it hard and firm. Trav stares up at the sharp, muscled lines of her, the bramble of curls cut bluntly to her chin. As the locker room bustles around them, G squats down to pull up the strap of Trav’s sports bra. Trav anxiously eyeballs the chipped black nail polish on Giroux’s index finger. 

“But you gotta _ stop _ right hooking other jammers.” She stretches it up a little higher. “I _ mean _ it,” she says with an eerie echo of Gritty shining through in the cadence of her words, his pedantic whine smoothed out into her cool confidence. G trips her finger up and lets the strap twang back onto Trav’s shoulder, a sharp little pinch of pain.

Trav claws at it dramatically, letting out an indignant yelp of surprise. 

Lindy breaks away from her conversation with Patty in the corner, her full lips pulling up into what looks like a funny little upside down grin from where Trav’s lying. 

“Yeah Trav, maybe try _ elbows _ like the rest of us,” she says, voice thick with her sing-song accent as she pulls her hair up into a ponytail. It swishes as she turns back to Patty, flaxen strands catching golden in the light. Pats throws Trav a smile. It’s a small, private little thing. 

Travis thinks about last night, looking up at her through the crush of sweaty bodies piled into somebody’s basement. She can’t remember who owned the place, didn’t think she even knew while they were there. They’d promptly lost Vee and Lindy to the crowd, but Patty had scooped Trav’s hand into her own and led her to the center of everything, kept her close as she’d snagged a bottle of cheap whisky from one of the tables at the back, guided her over to the makeshift dance floor with a hand on the small of Trav’s back. Patty’s touch was feather-light, but Trav remembers feeling the heat of her, pulsing and rolling off her fingertips in waves. 

She remembers the way the electronic thrum of the music felt pulsing through her ribcage, remembers the feel of Patty’s smooth skin under her palms as they’d danced together. She remembers pulling and pushing, smiles glinting under the flashing lights, spinning away from one another and being drawn back in, two bodies intertwined with only a film of sweat and adrenaline between them. 

Patty had leaned down and whisper-shouted in her ear, lips brushing her neck by accident and sending a sparkly shiver down Trav’s spine. Something involving the words _ “get some air _”, with the uptick of a question settling between them as Trav’s addled brain had been too busy staring at the colored lights pooling pink and purple in the dip of Patty’s exposed collarbone, glimmering with that shiny glittery shit she likes to put on whenever they go out together, the one that smells powdery and sweet like lavender. 

Then they’d somehow managed to get outside, only the half-drained bottle of whiskey and a shared cigarette blazing between them. Trav remembers an unkempt outdoor pool, its water milky-green with stray leaves and little clumps of swirling moss. They’d clambered onto cheap pool floaties precariously, water sloshing and cresting around them like a tiny tide. A flat pineapple and a sadly squashed crocodile, their colors washed out and blotchy from too much sun and not enough use. Trav had laid out starfish style across hers, held a hand out to grip the edge of Patty’s and pull her closer, laughing at the surprised little squawk it’d elicited from her. Side by side under the star-strewn sky above them, passing the cigarette back and forth and taking long, languid pulls from the whiskey bottle like they had all the time in the world. In that moment the world had slowed down and stretched around them, just the two of them out there and the muffled noise of the party inside. 

_ “Trav,_” Patty had slurred, voice even huskier than usual from all the shouting she’d done inside. She let her head loll to the side on the pool float, hair fanned out around her like a halo, curly from the humidity. “_Are you happy?” _

Trav had rolled her head to face her, stretched out her toes. Let the warm, sticky heat of the night roll over her. “_What, like, in general? Or right now?” _

They were bobbing aimlessly, some sort of oblong rotation spinning them slowly around the pool. She’d let her hand fall to the side, skimming the dirty water and feeling its slimy coolness on the pads of her fingertips. She’d always liked the outdoors, liked feeling nature around her and digging her hands into it like she was trying to get back in touch with some primal, essential part of her that she felt had been lost to the linoleum hallways of her old college and countless hours spent serving food at shitty truck-stop diners. 

Patty had laughed, bright and sparkly and pretty. “_Either. _”

Trav had lifted her hand, letting the dirty water slide through her fingers and leave a gritty coat of moss and leafy debris behind on her skin. She’d closed it into a tight fist, remembers wanting it to sink in and keep this moment in her palm forever: the steamy heat of the night, their mingled sweat and dirt and grime, the soft line of Patty’s smile, her intense eyes, blown big and dark with the alcohol. 

“_I’m always happy when I’m with you.” _It had just bubbled up from nowhere, snuck up and leapt out of her mouth before she could even think about it. 

Patty had blinked at her, staring for a moment before her features had folded themselves into a drunken grin, eyes all squished up with mirth and the tip of her tongue poking out rosy and pink between the gap in her front teeth. Trav remembers feeling something huge and indescribable erupt in her chest like fireworks, hungry flames dancing around and licking at the inside of her ribcage. 

“_You are so,” _ Patty had flung her hand out and sent a rocking push to the side of Trav’s floatie, “_f__uckin’--,” _ blunt, painted-black nails digging in to the filmy plastic, the end of Patty’s sentence lost in the ensuing whoosh of water and flailing limbs and capsized pool floaties. 

Then everything was spinning, and her body was swallowed up by watery softness, just milky bubbles swirling in front of Trav’s eyes against the emerald oblivion of the pool. Patty’s face rising forward from the gloom with wide shocked eyes and an open-mouth laugh sending fat, warbly bubbles rising to the surface. Her hair looked impossibly soft, curling and cresting and moving around her like silk. Patty had reached her hands out, planted both palms firmly on the side of Trav’s face and pulled her in, pressed their foreheads together under the murky water and looking right into her open, stinging eyes. Still smiling like this was something special, like they weren’t treading water in a dirty, abandoned pool, like they weren’t both plastered drunk with no ride home. 

Then they’d broken the surface, laughing like hyenas, wild and howling in the quiet night around them, hair plastered to their scalps, mascara running sooty black stripes down into twin grins, brighter than the crescent moon above them.

* * *

Trav stops right hooking. She starts pushing herself more on the rink, trying to be fast and slippery like a salmon fish in cold, fast-flowing water. One night during a slow, gruelling match-up she skates up between Vee and Lindy to spread her arms out in a wide, long arc and let them propel her forwards to pass four LA Queens and push the Flyers’ two point lead into a six point win. Her hair streams out behind her and her body feels strong and purposeful, a lethal weapon that only she has control over. 

Then it’s just the screaming crowd, the bright burn in the muscles of her legs, the heave of her chest as she raises her hands and flips everyone off, sticks her tongue out dirty and rude. The horn blares and Trav’s ears are filled with the rip-roar sounds of her teammates as they crowd around her and pull her into a spinning hug where she can’t tell whose limbs are whose, whose cheek is pressed to hers, whose hair is in her mouth. She’s laughing and they’re all babbling over one another, eyeblack smudged everywhere it shouldn’t be, everyone’s cheeks slapped pink with the adrenaline of their first win in who knows _ how _ long. She catches a glimpse of Gritty throwing one sharply muscled arm into the air to fist-pump, the freckles on his shoulders rippling when he plants both hands on the back of his head and looks up to the rafters as if in prayer, thanking the invisible roller derby Gods for blessing them tonight. She thinks his eyes look a little wet under the hot stadium lights, but she isn’t gonna call him on it or anything.

Travis feels a heavy hand settle on the top of her helmet, looks up and sees Patty’s warm eyes burning and blazing down at her. The heels of her palms press tight against Trav’s cheeks, and she stretches down to clank their helmets against each other in a perfect mirror of that night in the pool, that night from a million years ago that still swirls around in Trav’s dreams. 

“_Y__ou’re fucking incredible, _ ” she shouts, voice distorted by the chaos around them. “_I__ncredible, _” she repeats, again and again and again until it loses any meaning it could’ve held for either of them. 

Everything melts down into the two of them, just this one moment stretching on into bright glimmery grins and excited, wordless exchanges. Heavy looks and tender swipes of thumbs across cheekbones, words that don’t need to be said in order to be felt.


End file.
